Law & Disorder —

Flash flood: the (very short) story of YouTube

Remember when video on the Internet was painful? There were low bandwidth caps …

You might feel like access to online video clips is one of those "inalienable rights" you hear so much about. The Internet of 2009 is awash in video content, from your favorite Seinfeld episodes to homemade videos of cats playing the piano—and everything in between. And you can get the material you're looking for from a plethora of sources. And I really do mean plethora in the most literal of senses, where it translates into surfeit, excess, and overabundance. If you want to share a clip with the world, you can go to YouTube or MySpace TV, DailyMotion or Metacafe, Vimeo or Truveo—and the list goes on and on. Video hosting is now a very mature field with lots of consumer choice and its own set of conventions and traditions.

But in this seemingly unending cornfield of choices, YouTube is the cob that rises far above the rest. It is the most popular video service today, and the fourth-most-visited site on the entire Internet, according to the Alexa traffic-tracking service. On weekends, YouTube skips past Yahoo! to the number three spot. YouTube is probably the site you think of first when you're looking for videos to watch online, or when you need to host your own clips. And with a staggering four years of history, you can call YouTube the granddaddy of them all. The graybeard. The old pro. Yoda or Methuselah.

That's right: in 2004, there was no YouTube. Most of the other video sharing sites we use today didn't exist either. YouTube came along in early 2005, and changed how we use the Internet in an instant.

The Dark Ages

Back in 2004, finding video content online wasn't as quick and easy as searching your favorite video site and blasting away. You could find clips scattered across websites, FTP shares, peer-to-peer networking services like KaZaA, Gnutella, or relative newcomer BitTorrent, but it was a multistep process that left much to be desired.

First, you had to find the files you wanted and download them, then hope that you had the correct audio and video codecs installed to be able to watch the darn thing in Windows Media Player, Quicktime, or RealPlayer. That was easier said than done for the average user, as the technical juggling involved could require some rare power of geekdom. On top of that, site owners often had bandwidth caps on their accounts, and you didn't need to download a 100-megabyte video too many times to run into those limits.

I know, it sounds medieval and torturous, and it was a wonder that anybody could watch digital videos at all. But digital video cameras were coming down in price and going up in popularity. Meanwhile, broadband access was coming into its own and the ever-increasing power of modern chips from Intel and AMD was begging for a video workout on your desktop. The time was ripe for a change.

From zero to a million a day

YouTube was not the first video hosting service on the Web, and we could argue all day over whether it was the best. But co-founders Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim kickstarted the site with some solid business ideas that quickly made it the obvious choice for would-be clip publishers and video watchers.

A sweepstakes contest doling out an Apple a day was possibly the smartest move YouTube made in the early days. Users collected entries in the drawing by posting more videos and inviting new users, and the $250 iPod Nano had enough trendy cachet and monetary weight to become a real incentive.

On top of that move, YouTube videos quickly caught on with another fast-growing Internet community as MySpace users started embedding videos in their personal pages. On the back of growth phenomena like these, YouTube exploded from a good idea to a million video views a day in just a few months. YouTube was Slashdotted in August, 2005, and co-founder Jawed Karim took that as an early sign of breaking through to the masses. Now, YouTube dwarfs Slashdot in traffic volume and mainstream cred. My, how times change.

Through a connection the three co-founders shared from their time together at PayPal, they drummed up $3.5 million of venture funding from Sequoia Capital, then another $8 million in April, 2006. YouTube was already on its way to becoming one of the most popular online destinations when the buyout rumors started circling. When Google bought the service for $1.65 billion in October, 2006, YouTube was a bona fide cultural phenomenon that had single-handedly revolutionized the way we use the Internet.

Challenges

At the time of the Google buyout, Entrepreneur Magazine reported that YouTube was spending $1 million a month on bandwidth bills, as users were uploading 65,000 videos and watching 100 million clips daily. That educated guess works out to an average hosting cost of about $0.01 per video watched, which doesn't sound like much until you multiply it by 3 billion showings a month. While the site did have some serious advertising partners like NBC and Warner Music Group, the advertising revenue fell far short of covering the costs. As of Google's 2008 annual report, the company claimed to have invested "considerable time and resources" in YouTube, but "we have yet to realize significant revenue benefits" from the acquisition.

Moreover, many of the most popular pieces of YouTube content were copyrighted works like official music videos and clips from TV shows like Saturday Night Live and Comedy Central. YouTube was attracting lawsuits like a honey pot attracts black-hat hackers (or bees, I guess), and billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban noted in his typical sweet way that "anyone who buys YouTube is a moron."

What's the big deal?

But YouTube brought a lot of new things to the table.

Playback Just Worked (TM) as long as you had the Adobe Flash player installed. No more codec headaches or download-and-watch roundabouts, and it was a simple installation that would also let you play Bookworm and Bedazzled, among other things. Indeed, Flash was popular long before it became the industry standard handler for online video streams. Hold that thought.

Uploading videos was almost as easy as watching them, as long as your material fit inside the 10-minute and 100-megabyte box that YouTube provided you in the early days. You were—and still are—free to upload movies in a variety of formats, from longtime favorites like .MPG and .AVI to cell phone standard .3GP and high-quality h.264 encodings. YouTube's servers do the dirty work of converting the file to the .FLV format that Flash likes to play, and you're done. No fuss, no muss, and most importantly, no payments.

"YouTube was not the first video hosting service on the Web, and we could argue all day over whether it was the best"

It depends on your definition of 'best'. All of the other video services suffered from various fatal flaws:1. You had to register and log in every time you used it.2. You had to download a proprietary, buggy, and very large sized video viewer. Every site had their own viewer. If you wanted to look at a lot of video you had to load a lot of viewers on your machine, which, of course caused all kinds of havoc.3. They would only accept videos of a very exact format and size, which was often very difficult to create given the limited video editing software at the time.4. The video menu was difficult to use to find videos.

YouTube was the first video hosting service to not have -any- of these faults. They did all the work on their end to convert videos and they figured out a way to use Flash to show the videos. Since it was easy to use, everyone started posting their videos there. So people wanting to see lots of interesting videos would naturally go there first. By the time other sites caught on for how they should get and store videos, YouTube had already become the standard place to post and view videos.

"Google's in-house bundles of dark fiber"You could write an article about this, if anyone would talk. Google bought up enough dark fibers to create their own world-wide network. Of course if they are using it then it is no longer 'dark'.

For a while, I really liked YouTube. I could make a list of my favorite songs and have them play randomly. I could watch anime that's not licensed in the US, and even some that is licensed, and decide if I wanted to buy it when it became available.

No, I do not particularly care about copyright. I do buy things like anime if, after watching it, I decide I like it. I now have a subscription to Crunchyroll and pay a reasonable monthly fee to legally watch anime almost as soon as it is released in Japan.

It's all a matter of convenience and usefulness. There's also the matter of incessant commercials that YouTube is now embedding. Crunchyroll doesn't have any (with a paid subscription). If I could pay a reasonable flat fee to stream music and videos to my home, I would do so. But various sources are trying to prevent that happening: they want me to bleed every cent possible and maintain as much control as possible. They don't want it to be convenient or particularly useful.

I have a feeling that YouTube is going to end up like Napster: corporatized and neutered into effective oblivion. People will leave it when they find all the files they want have been taken down or you have to pay some exorbient fee to access just that file. They'll go somewhere else, even if what they do ends up being illegal, because in reality people don't give a shit about the DMCA, only about getting what they want.

Part of the thing about Youtube I like is that you discover content that you never knew about (aside from stuff like "Surprise Kitty"). For many (most?) folks it is easier to just purchase stuff than to trawl around the darker sides of the net to pirate stuff.

Originally posted by zonk3r:Part of the thing about Youtube I like is that you discover content that you never knew about (aside from stuff like "Surprise Kitty"). For many (most?) folks it is easier to just purchase stuff than to trawl around the darker sides of the net to pirate stuff.

That's absolutely right, and it's why I actually don't mind the invasive "buy mp3 @ Amazon" banners under some songs that are now being legally shown on the service.

If the movie, TV and music industries realized what a great free marketing tool YouTube would be for their content, they would be onto something big. Instead, they issue takedown notices for the most inane things like a song playing on a radio in the background. Madness.

Google catches flak from some governments for allowing videos critical to the regime to be published and then viewed by the nation's own citizens. The company also comes under fire every time it agrees to work with these governments and effectively censor the agents of free speech and open information. It's a tough balancing act.

It's only a tough balancing act because Google, by corporate nature (and presumably by legal necessity) places profit motive above human morality. Any organization with the resources of a huge technology corporation and the basic morality of any human being would be able to make the choice that "videos critical of the regime" should be aired, and that deciding to "work with these governments [to] effectively censor the agents of free speech and open information" is fundamentally antihuman.

Interestingly, to me, this raises pretty compelling questions about the nature of the profit motive. I would be willing to bet that a vanishingly small minority of anyone in the chain of decision-making at Google (or any similarly able-to-broadcast technology company) would favor working with corrupt regimes to stifle the availability of dissenting voices under their power. While every media company places its own interests above the interests of its audience, it's really not in Google's (or any other media company's) interest to stifle broadcasts in this particular way (editorial oversight is much more palatable from their own perspective). But where profit overrides these concerns, it becomes stupid (if not illegal) to thumb your nose at a censoring regime.

Honestly, I had fully expected YouTube to charge a nominal yearly fee to let people share their own 1080p videos. Adding 720p seemed like the freebie to wet the appetite, and a small charge of about $25 a year (ala Flickr Pro accounts, or maybe less, say $15?) didn't seem unreasonable to get the best of the best.

Would that really have been a big problem? Personally I wouldn't have had an issue with it. More and more people are going to have cameras that can (at least technically) make 1080p home videos, so it just made sense.

Of course they can't do that now that they've offered it for free.

I still wonder what they'll do. Perhaps they'll add a subscription service that lets you embed 720p and/or 1080p videos. It's not unheard of: Vimeo already does something like this.

One way or the other they're going to have to roll out a Pro account option. I probably would have signed up for 1080p if the price was reasonable (see above), but I'm 99.9% sure that I won't do it simply to enable embedding HD videos. Blogs really aren't the way that people do things these days. It's all Youtube.com, Facebook (which already allows HD movies), or MySpace, and I have no idea what MySpace is doing these days.

Anyway, I'm tired and my curiosity has the better of me. That's enough rambles from me this morning.

I don't believe that YouTube's infrastructure costs are network-related so much as they are server-related. Bandwidth is getting cheaper every day, and Anders is correct that Google is able to leverage their scale and peering arrangements to bring their network transit costs to far below what the typical website pays. However, the servers and network infrastructure is a very different story - while the streams themselves are HTTP and as such relatively lightweight on the server side, the switches/routers needed at the scale required, as well as the encoding systems, have to suck up a lot of capex, as well as rack space and power. I'll bet *that* costs Google far more than the cost of flinging YouTube's bits around.

And the other thing that is slowly cropping up and making things annoying is the region restrictions

QFT! Does something like TOR exist in the States? Hmm I might even pay (a little) for something as simple as a decent https high-bandwidth proxy that is in the states.

And I suppose there are lots of those but the region restrictions are not yet that common that I bothered to search for one.

Yes Tor does exist in the states, BUT sometimes you end up is a worst position using Tor. For instance you could end up being shown you are in Germany. That has happened in my case and MORE content was censored because of that. I still don't understand why Big Content would censor or remove their own videos when they would be great advertisement for sales. AND I DO BUY! When I find a take down notice it just makes me more determined to try to stick it to Big Content which is something I don't really want to do even tho I can. What do they think they are gaining by doing that?

Until YT, we had no fucking idea just how many idiots there are on this planet who have access to keyboards.

I had no idea until I read this comment!

Anyhow, when YouTube first popped up, I absolutely hated it because it was VERY slow, sometimes taking 3x-10x realtime to buffer -- I was excited when GoogleVideo showed up...but then Google bought YouTube, which fixed the speed problem.

As a NoScript advocate, I also appreciate YouTube for only having two script domains to allow (youtube.com & yt.com for some account management), and working properly no matter what site has embedded a YouTube video.

That combination puts the tools of video journalism in everyone's pocket, and it could keep YouTube's growth on an exponential trajectory for another few years, should Google ultimately side with users against their governments.

I hope they do side with users against governments. Even here in the U.S. this is (IMO) an issue. Lately it seems like every time the government sides with Big Content/Banking/Insurance/Whatever they are expressly siding against the citizens they purport to protect and represent. It's annoying.

Originally posted by Killer Orca:Could anyone explain to me what this dark fiber is that Google has? I've heard of the U.S. government's black fiber, not on any fiber map, but never dark.

Dark fiber just means fiber that isn't being used. It is 'dark' because it isn't being lit up by a laser. After the Telecom bubble and subsequent crash around 2000 there were a lot of overbuilt networks going out of business. Google bought up a lot of their fiber--including fiber going coast-to-coast. At one time people wondered whether or not Google was going to set up their own public network, but, as this article speculates, they are probably just using it to reduce their own data transport costs.

I remember when Youtube first came out. There were definitely others before it, but they had the best marketing (the site name itself trumped the competition) and easiest to use interface. Simply put, it was built by people who had successful web experience (founders were from Paypal) and lots of funding.

Use it just about everyday during work, even more than my gmail. They really set the bar for online video. Anyone else wonder what would have happened to Youtube if some other company bought it up vs. Google? Hard to think of a better match.

Jefe: I have put many beautiful pinatas in the storeroom, each of them filled with little suprises. El Guapo: Many pinatas? Jefe: Oh yes, many! El Guapo: Would you say I have a plethora of pinatas? Jefe: A what? El Guapo: A *plethora*. Jefe: Oh yes, you have a plethora. El Guapo: Jefe, what is a plethora? Jefe: Why, El Guapo? El Guapo: Well, you told me I have a plethora. And I just would like to know if you know what a plethora is. I would not like to think that a person would tell someone he has a plethora, and then find out that that person has *no idea* what it means to have a plethora. Jefe: Forgive me, El Guapo. I know that I, Jefe, do not have your superior intellect and education. But could it be that once again, you are angry at something else, and are looking to take it out on me?

Originally posted by netposer:The ONLY REASON youtube was successful....they allowed copyrighted material to be posted. Youtube became popular because that was "the" place to watch videos that would be taken down at other sites.

I'll admit that it's LESS painful that it used to be, but there is still pain. Thanks to YouTube, Flash is everywhere. I care less about the clock cycles it consumes than I do about the fact that Flash crashes and burns so often.

Not really sure what's the solid part of YouTube's business ideas. Thus far they've succeeded in spending money to attract users, but not earning a profit. Without a profit, they are a charity, not a business.

Granted, there are tons of businesses started that have an initial period where they burn cash with little or no revenue. But there has to be a justifiable end, a forecast of some sort that says by year X we'll start turning a profit, and break even by year Y. "Well attract users and eventually sell lots of ads" seems rather reckless.

I do understand that to the guys who started YouTube, it was probably all about the exit strategy: build a site with a huge user base, sell it for a mint, profit! But this type of strategy should only be rewarded if the underlying business model has substantial value. For now, it remains to be demonstrated that YouTube has any value at all.

Yes, I am bitter that I am not as successful. I could have been that crazy haired goofy asian in the pictures.

Originally posted by MaxRC:But this type of strategy should only be rewarded if the underlying business model has substantial value. For now, it remains to be demonstrated that YouTube has any value at all.

It's all a matter of your long-term vision (assuming there is one at Google in regards to YouTube). I agree with you in principle, but there's always the chance that someone really clever foresees a concrete future benefit to this that we, as armchair analysts, are missing.

If it were Microsoft buying YouTube, on the other hand, I would suspect it was just a vanity purchase for Ballmer. His long-term vision is awfully blurry lately.

quote:

Yes, I am bitter that I am not as successful. I could have been that crazy haired goofy asian in the pictures.

Originally posted by Wudan Master:You can't deny that they used copyright material to become the number 1 name in online video and now the user made stuff is popular because the name youtube is synonymous with online video.

Yes you can. They didn't post anything. They provided a blank canvas for the community, which proceeded to post videos, both infringing and user-generated. It became the go-to site because they made it so simple that the average moron could use it.

Honestly, that the infringing videos proved vastly more popular should have been a huge hint to the media companies who were still mired in the dark ages at the time, and had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the computer age.

YouTube is certainly a success story of the internet, but the article doesn't really point on the fact that broadband internet access wasn't as widespread as it was now. I remember waiting 20 (painful) minutes to download a single 3 minute song on countless occasions, and even then you could never be sure that your dialup might fail due to a phonecall or some other petty annoyance. So aside from all the other hassles, video was just out.

Speaking of game-changers, I've been keeping close tabs on a company called deleted spam, and I reckon that in the next 5 years they could revolutionize the internet e-commerce model, similar to YouTube and online video.

Google catches flak from some governments for allowing videos critical to the regime to be published and then viewed by the nation's own citizens. The company also comes under fire every time it agrees to work with these governments and effectively censor the agents of free speech and open information. It's a tough balancing act.

It's only a tough balancing act because Google, by corporate nature (and presumably by legal necessity) places profit motive above human morality. Any organization with the resources of a huge technology corporation and the basic morality of any human being would be able to make the choice that "videos critical of the regime" should be aired, and that deciding to "work with these governments [to] effectively censor the agents of free speech and open information" is fundamentally antihuman.

You do realize that these countries just block YouTube and other properties entirely if they are hosting content that is unfavorable to them, right? The question is not nearly as clear-cut as you make it out to be.